This paper focuses on the effects of vocational training programmes on the duration of unemployment in Eastern Germany. We use information from administrative data of the Federal Employment Office. To allow for observable and possible unobservable influences we apply a multivariate mixed...

This paper investigates whether and to what extent demographic change has an impact on human capital accumulation. The effect of the relative cohort size on educational attainment of young adults in Germany is analyzed utilizing data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for West-German...

In this paper we estimate, for the 1989-93 period in Belgium, the effect of vocational classroom training on the rate of transition from unemployment. We propose a ?control function? estimator accounting for variable treatment effects. In the absence of interaction effects between explanatory...

During the 2001-8 period, the employment rate of people with a disability remained remarkably low in most western economies, hardly responding to better macroeconomic conditions and favourable anti-discrimination legislation and interventions. Continuing health and productivity improvements in...

This paper develops a model in which the interaction of entrepreneurial investments and power of the owners of land or other natural resources determines structural change and economic development. A more equal distribution of natural resources promotes structural change and growth through two...

The Axial Age, which lasted between 800 B. C. E. and 200 B. C. E., covers an era in which the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid simultaneously and independently in various geographic areas, and all three major monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity and Islam were born between 1200 B. C....

Ethnic and religious fractionalization have important effects on economic growth and development, but their role in internal violent conflicts has been found to be negligible and statistically insignificant. These findings have been invoked in refutation of the Huntington hypothesis, according...

This article analyses IMF estimates of economic growth in 180 countries (IMF, 2009), and inks the results to the Re-orient approach, put forward by Frank, 1998. With global economic gravitation shifting to the Indian Ocean/Pacific region, the article also analyses the role of MNC (foreign...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

This research argues that variations in the interplay between cultural assimilation and cultural diffusion have played a significant role in giving rise to differential patterns of economic development across the globe. Societies that were geographically less vulnerable to cultural diffusion...